Meaning of “Window”

Wind eye could stand for po­ten­tial for ven­ti­la­tion and the ca­pac­i­ty to view through/see. Pret­ty sim­ple, but a good ba­sis for the sig­nif­i­cance of our sub­ject. Not on­ly does the win­dow pro­vide for vis­i­bil­i­ty and aer­a­tion it of­ten is shaped and placed to with­stand the el­e­ments. Our Ana­to­lian win­dow be­ing placed so high pro­tects res­i­dents from be­ing flood­ed. Goth­ic stained-glass win­dows are par­ti­tioned with iron and hinges, so they can with­stand the force of se­vere winds. If those large win­dows were of one piece and not par­ti­tioned with room for air, they would break from wind force. I learned about Goth­ic stained glass win­dows from Pro­fes­sor William Clark, a learned source for mat­ters Goth­ic.
Val Clery, a po­et­ic and in­sight­ful Cana­di­an wrote the text for a pho­to­graph­ic book on win­dows and the pri­ma­ry para­graphs are worth quot­ing for fact and sug­ges­tion:

Our win­dows are a re­al mea­sure of the open­ness and free­dom with which we live now, of our sense of feel­ing set­tled and se­cure. Through them we may watch the growth and de­cline and re­turn of days and sea­sons; may ob­serve and be ob­served by our friends, our neigh­bors and the pass­ing world; and may ap­pre­ci­ate our in­volve­ment in life out­side, and our in­di­vid­ual place in it.

Our win­dows are our old­est, sim­plest and most di­rect medi­um of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We look through them con­tin­u­al­ly, but how of­ten do we look at them? Look at win­dows! They have more to tell you–about your her­itage and about your present self–than they have ever shown you.

The word win­dow de­rives from the Mid­dle Eng­lish words win­dowe or win­do­he whose ori­gins are in the Old Norse word vin­dau­ga1, mean­ing “wind eye.” How many of the words we have in­her­it­ed de­scribe with such apt sim­plic­i­ty the pur­pose of what they de­fine?

The ear­li­est known win­dows dis­cov­ered in the dwellings of a Ne­olith­ic vil­lage un­earthed in Ana­to­lia, were lit­er­al­ly wind eyes–small aper­tures pierc­ing the thick walls of hous­es, through which peo­ple could look out over the com­mu­ni­ty they had cre­at­ed, and through which the fresh air and sun­light could come in­to their homes.

Those first win­dows were more than an ac­tu­al break­through, they were a sym­bol­ic one. The vil­lage it­self meant that men had learned at last how to live and work to­geth­er in peace. The open­ing up of win­dows was to­ken of their grow­ing sense of se­cu­ri­ty and of com­mu­ni­ty.
(Clery, 1979, no page num­bers)

I ad­vise my read­ers to go to this po­et­ic source and you can find it in the li­brary, or buy it at Ama­zon, Barnes & No­ble, or Abe­Books.
In the course of con­tin­u­ing we will meet with oth­er his­toric sources and find oth­er po­et­ry from our sub­ject…

ENDNOTE

1
Af­ter the Viking raiders, the Norse col­o­niz­ers of east­ern and north­ern Eng­land around 900 in­tro­duced words of Old Norse ori­gin that en­tered, in­ter­min­gled, and com­pet­ed with those of Old Eng­lish. The Old Eng­lish nosþyrel, (“nose-hole”, or “hole through which the nose breathes”, [here “þ” is the let­ter thorn, writ­ten nowa­days as “th”]) won out over Old Norse nǫs, be­com­ing our cur­rent nos­tril. But, Old Eng­lish eagþyrel (“eye-hole”, or “hole through which the eye sees”) even­tu­al­ly lost out to Old Norse vin­dau­ga (“wind-eye”, orig­i­nal­ly re­fer­ring to an unglazed hole in a roof) which be­came our win­dow, in­stead of a hy­po­thet­i­cal eye­tril.

About Suzanne Frank

I first let curiosity lead me to windows. As a child I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade leaning out my grandparents’ 10-storey-high window on 69th Street & Central Park West, and as a Ph.D. candidate I was drawn to the large windows along the Amsterdam canal houses in which the residents acted out their lives with little self-con­scious­ness. Now, I see them still as curiosities, but curiosities with artful bents. My posts will be about matters that I am attracted to in their historical dimension; in their beauty; in their embrasure or rejection of ecological aspects; and in their language of formal meanings; etc. Friends and colleagues suggest the topics and I follow up on them, or I suddenly get an idea on my own after going on a bus ride or reading in a library …… Stay Tuned!

Comments

“Aper­tures in the Wall” makes us aware of the mean­ing of the win­dow: it is through it that the light of a new day aris­es, from where we see some­thing with dis­tan­ci­a­tion, the place from where we see with­out be­ing seen and from where one de­cides to evade long be­fore the act of phys­i­cal­ly cross­ing a door’s thresh­old. But the un­der­ly­ing mean­ing Suzanne Frank seems to present is that the win­dow, just like the stair­case, the door, the wall, are aes­thet­ic con­di­tions unique to ar­chi­tec­tur­al in­ven­tion.

Gabriela Izar, a new, close friend, adds a di­men­sion when she in­tro­duces the word ‘dis­tan­ci­a­tion’: this word while not in Webster’s dic­tio­nary, com­bines the roots of the words dis­tance and dis­tinc­tion and makes so much sense of what we find in front of the win­dow in the ear­ly part of the day…something hap­pen­ing away from the win­dow and that makes it­self known to us.

In ad­di­tion to my re­sponse to Gabriela Izar I will say she is per­fect­ly right that the aes­thet­ic in­tent of a win­dow is most im­por­tant, but I would al­so say that some­times the so­cial mo­ti­va­tion of­ten hinges on aes­thet­ic the­o­ries for the object(s) in ques­tion.